Day of the Dead

by J. A. Jance

“You didn’t…” he began.

  She turned back on him. “Didn’t what?” she demanded. “Didn’t let you wreck everything we’ve worked for?”

  For some reason all the muscles in both Larry’s hands quit working at once. He dropped the trash bag, letting the bloodied clothing spill messily onto the floor. The knife slipped from his other hand. It fell to the concrete floor and landed on its tip. The top inch or so of the steel blade shattered while the rest of the knife spun out of reach under the car. Leaving them where they fell, Larry followed his naked wife into the house and down the hall to the bathroom.

  Gayle had turned on the shower in the tub and was stepping into it when Larry entered the room behind her. Seeing him, she shook her head in resignation. “Well,” she said, “as long as you’re here, you could just as well come wash my back.”

  And, God help him, that’s exactly what Larry Stryker did because, no matter what, he always did what Gayle wanted him to do. He stripped off his clothing and clambered into the tub behind her. She was waiting for him, standing under the steaming-hot cascade with little rivulets of bloodied water streaming from her hair. He watched in fascination as they coursed down her neck and across the gentle slope of her breasts.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a bar of soap. “You do know how to use this, don’t you?”

  And so he had scrubbed her clean. A pale pink sheen of blood sluiced off her body and made its way across the white porcelain tub and down the drain. She stood like a compliant child under his ministrations, letting him wash her body and shampoo her hair. All the while she watched him with those amazing green eyes of hers, eyes that never wavered and seemed somehow unaffected by both shampoo and soap. Just when Larry thought he had completed the job, she handed him the fingernail brush. It turned out she was right to do so. Close examination revealed crusted blood still lingering under her nails.

  When he had finished with the nailbrush and glanced back at Gayle, she was smiling at him. “See there?” she said. “Lady Macbeth was wrong. The blood does too come off. Now it’s my turn. Let me wash you.”

  By then the hot water was beginning to give out. Even so, Gayle worked her customary magic. From the beginning she had always known exactly what to do to make Larry wild to have her. It had been true when he’d first met the eighteen-year-old college sophomore who was two years younger than he was. It was still true now, twelve years later. Gradually the water went from warm to cold, but Larry didn’t notice. He was aware of nothing but the tantalizing touch, first of Gayle’s hands and later her lips, on his all-too-compliant body. It was all he could do simply to remain standing.

  Finally, she turned off the water. Without bothering to towel off, she led him, stumbling and still soaking wet, into the bedroom, where, in one smooth motion, she drew him down onto the bed and into her body.

  Gayle had always liked sex, but that night she was ravenous for it, wanting him—giving and taking—far beyond anything Larry could ever remember. It was only later, when Gayle was sleeping and Larry wasn’t, that he realized what had happened. Rather than being appalled by what she had done, Gayle was excited by it. And by allowing himself to be drawn into her frenzied acts of fierce love-making she had infected him with the same excitement. She had killed for him and then come home to make love. What drug could be more intoxicating than that?

  Gayle dozed off almost immediately, while Larry lay beside her, sleepless and spent. As the hours dragged by, his initial sense of euphoria disappeared as his mind tried to grapple with the consequences of what she had done. If she had actually murdered the girl—and Larry didn’t doubt it—how much of her terrible crime was his fault, his responsibility?

  Larry was more than willing to acknowledge that he had violated the physician’s sacred creed to do no harm. He had taken sexual advantage of a patient—a helpless minor—who had been under his care. That was bad enough—bad enough to have him tossed out of the world of medicine and bad enough to make him liable for criminal proceedings as well, but what he had done wrong was a long way short of murder.

  But Gayle? Not only had she slaughtered someone in cold blood using a knife from their own kitchen, she had come home afterward and exhibited not a trace of remorse. She hadn’t been ashamed of what she’d done; hadn’t been sorry. Instead, she had come home to her husband reveling in it—wearing the gory evidence of her crime as though it were a badge of courage or even honor. And then, by having Larry clean that evidence away and by welcoming him into her body, she had somehow made her crime his and had turned him into an accessory—a willing accessory—to murder. In the process, she had extracted something else from him as well—his tacit agreement to secrecy and silence.

  Larry had always known Gayle was headstrong and ambitious, but until that night he would never have thought her capable of murder. She had been provoked—pushed beyond the limits of her endurance. And what had caused that to happen? Larry’s actions. Larry’s stupidity. And that made all of this Larry’s fault. He was the one who had pushed Gayle to this appalling extremity. No matter what the law said, in Larry’s mind and heart he really was an accessory to murder—both before and after the fact. If Gayle went down for the crime, so would he.

  He could hear himself now lamely trying to explain to some stupid cop exactly how it had all come about. Well, yes, his wife had come home covered in blood. “And what did you do then, Dr. Stryker?” the cop would ask, and Larry would have to explain how first he had cleaned Gayle up by getting into the shower with her and then screwing her brains out before finally getting around to calling the authorities. Try telling that to a jury—or a judge.

  It was almost dawn before Larry finally began to come to grips with the reality of his predicament. The unspoken complicity Gayle had exacted from him in the bathtub and in the bedroom was far more all-encompassing and compelling than any paltry marriage vows. Those Larry had broken time and again without so much as a second thought.

  But this was something else. Ten years ago, in a church, he had promised to love and cherish Gayle Madison Stryker until “death do us part.” As dawn began to color the sky outside their bedroom window, he finally saw how those very same words now meant something else entirely. Gayle had Larry by the throat and by the balls, and she wasn’t letting him get away. Ever. And maybe that wasn’t half bad.

  Larry had always been his mother’s “good boy,” not because he had never been in trouble but because he had never been caught. Growing up in a time that predated video surveillance, he had shop-lifted with impunity all through grade school and high school, and he had loved it. Had loved doing it and getting away with it; had loved living on the edge where he might be caught but wasn’t. He had loved being accepted as an “exemplary” student—as someone his teachers pointed out as a “perfect role model” for others—when Larry, in fact, knew better.

  He had married Gayle because she was beautiful and rich, but it had never occurred to him that they had so much in common. Tonight he realized that the person he thought he had married was someone else entirely. It was like picking up a pencil and discovering, once it was in your hand, that it was actually a stick of dynamite. By doing what he had done to Roseanne Orozco, Larry Stryker had unwittingly lit the fuse. He was yoked to someone who, with a single word, could bring the world crashing down around him. He was scared to death, but it gave him a rush—an incredible rush—and he loved it.

  When the alarm sounded at six, Larry reached over and switched it off. Gayle, sleeping peacefully beside him, never stirred. Throwing off the still-damp sheet, Larry crawled out of bed. Once he was dressed, he went straight to the garage. He picked up the spilled clothes and stuffed them back into the bag, then he scrambled around on the floor until he had retrieved both the knife and its broken tip. When he looked inside the Camaro, he was amazed by the amount of blood he found there. The seats, front and back, and the floorboard were soaked with it. He must have been blind not to have noticed it the night before. Now, though, there was nothing to
do but go to work with soap and water and try to clean it up.

  Gayle had taken care of his mess, so Larry needed to take care of hers. He was doing just that when the door opened. Gayle stood in the doorway, with a smoldering Virginia Slim in one hand and a copy of TV Guide in the other.

  “What did we watch last night?” she asked.

  “Watch?”

  “On TV. If someone asks where we were or what we were doing, we were home all night long, watching television together. That means we’d better have our stories straight about what we watched, what we ate, and what time we went to bed.”

  Saying nothing, Larry returned to the task of scrubbing the car, but that was when he realized, once and for all, that the genie was out of the bottle. And she wasn’t ever going back in.

  MARCH 2002

  Maria Elena Dominguez rode the bus from Hermosillo to Nogales, fighting to stay awake and clutching her backpack all the while. There was little of value in the knapsack—only her papers and the change of clothing she’d been given earlier that morning as she left El Asilo Seguro. Still, Maria Elena was afraid someone might try to steal her paltry belongings. Even when she dozed off, she didn’t relinquish her hold on the backpack’s straps.

  “So,” Señora Duarte had said with a sneer as Maria Elena slipped silently into her office at eight-thirty that morning. “You must be one of the lucky ones.”

  Fifteen-year-old Maria Elena didn’t feel lucky. Her father, a leftist sympathizer, had been gunned down by a troop of soldiers four years earlier in their tiny village in Chiapas. Then, during her father’s funeral, the same group of soldiers had appeared again. This time, Maria Elena’s mother and her older brother, both of them screaming and fighting their captors, had been hauled away in a single armored vehicle, while a petrified Maria Elena had been carted off in another.

  The driver of that one, an older man who reminded Maria Elena of her grandfather, had been kind enough. He had given her food, sharing some of his own with her. Several days later, she had found herself in a Franciscan-run orphanage on the outskirts of Matías Romero in Oaxaca. Looking back, Maria Elena realized the orphanage hadn’t been such a bad place. The problem was, Maria Elena didn’t consider herself an orphan and refused to stay there. Twice she ran away but was picked up and returned to the orphanage without ever making it home to Chiapas.

  The third time she ran away she was caught and shipped off to another facility, a juvenile detention center in Colima. Finally, for reasons none of them understood, she and two other girls, accompanied by a guard and wearing shackles, were taken by bus far to the north to yet a third facility—El Asilo Seguro outside Hermosillo. Despite its benign-sounding name—the Safe Haven—El Asilo Seguro was by far the worst of all, and it was anything but safe.

  For one thing, boys and girls were warehoused together. There were supposedly separate sleeping facilities, but curfews inside the institution were widely ignored and sleeping arrangements poorly supervised. Sexual encounters were forbidden, but that prohibition wasn’t strictly enforced, either. Many of the inmates, like Maria Elena, were orphans whose crimes involved nothing more serious than running away. Others, at ages as young as eleven or twelve, were already hardened criminals. That number included two convicted killers, several drug dealers, and a band of tough-eyed gang members who carried knives and were a constant simmering threat to everyone around them.

  Arriving from Colima, Maria Elena and the two girls with her, Madelina and Lucia, were smart enough to figure out that the knife-wielding boys were interested in girls for one reason and one reason only. In order to avoid being preyed upon, the girls manufactured a story about how they had been sent away from their previous institution because all three had been diagnosed as HIV positive. To their amazement, the ruse worked. It turned out that the devil-may-care gangster wannabes who weren’t afraid of drugs or guns or knives or each other were deathly afraid of AIDS. The new arrivals were pretty much left to themselves. The three girls had survived by sticking together, by speaking only to one another, and by making themselves invisible.

  Maria Elena tried hiding out in silence now, avoiding Señora Duarte’s question and piercing gaze with a simple shrug rather than a verbal reply.

  “You’re wrong there,” the señora said, pulling her reading glasses down onto her sharp nose. She glared through them at a stack of papers on the desk in front of her. “You really are lucky. It would seem you have a patron,” she continued, “a benefactor in the States who has arranged for you to come live with him and his wife and go to school.”

  Maria Elena’s jaw dropped. Once she had loved school. She had wanted to grow up and become a teacher, but the last time she had actually attended school had been three years earlier in the orphanage. In Colima, there had been a few classrooms, fewer teachers, and even fewer books, but at El Asilo Seguro no one bothered to pretend that they intended to reform or educate their charges. Maria Elena’s heart beat fast at this first tiny glimmer of hope. Perhaps her long-abandoned dream was possible after all. It was strange that she hadn’t been consulted about these arrangements in advance, but still…

  “I have examined the papers,” Señora Duarte went on. “Everything appears to be in order. You are to catch the bus from Hermosillo to Nogales this afternoon. The ticket is right here, as is your passport and identification card. You’ll find some money here as well, enough so you’ll be able to buy food and water for your journey. You will be picked up at the bus station in Nogales and taken from there to your new home.”

  Maria Elena’s head teemed with questions. She had heard some of the older kids talking about passports and identification cards. Legal ones were very difficult to come by, and forged ones were obtainable only by those with enough money to pay the price. What would happen to her if she reached the border and for some reason her paperwork wasn’t in order? And how would she know this person—this kind stranger—who was supposed to meet her in far-off Nogales?

  “But…” she began aloud.

  Señora Duarte’s disapproving frown silenced her. “Certainly you wouldn’t be so foolish as to turn down such an opportunity!” she declared.

  “No, señora,” Maria Elena murmured in agreement. “I would not.”

  “Very well, then.” Señora Duarte picked up the papers and stowed them inside an outside pocket of the knapsack, which she then zipped up. “Here,” she said, handing it over. “You can’t travel in your uniform. Go see Señora Escalante. She’ll give you something suitable to wear.”

  As directed, Señora Escalante had outfitted Maria Elena with two sets of someone else’s cast-off clothing—one to wear on the bus and another to change into later. The skirt and blouse were too small; the shoes far too big. They flopped up and down when she walked. By the time she had walked through the bus station and found food to eat, Maria Elena had painful blisters on both heels. But none of that mattered. Her feet might be sore, but her heart was light. She was out. She was free. She was on her way to a new life.

  At the bus station, she wondered briefly what would happen if she tried to trade the ticket she had—the one to Nogales—for one that would take her back to Chiapas. But who would be there if I did go home? she asked herself. She knew for sure that her father was dead. Most likely, so were her mother and brother. After four years, who would be left to take her in or even care about her?

  In the end, she boarded the bus for Heroica Nogales. Where will I end up? she wondered as the blurred landscape unfolded outside the moving window. Along the way, the world outside that window became more and more barren. More and more empty. That emptiness bothered Maria Elena. It reminded her of how empty her life was. It made her wonder what her new life would be like. Who were these kind people—this man and woman—who were taking a stranger into their home? Were they hoping for a daughter to replace one they had lost, perhaps, or were they looking for a servant—little more than a slave—who would work for them for next to nothing?

  Other girls had left El Asilo
Seguro in similar circumstances. A year earlier, Maria Elena’s friend from Colima—Madelina—had been adopted out and had gone north as well—north to what they all regarded as the Promised Land, north to the United States. There was a graffiti-covered map of North America on the wall outside Señora Duarte’s office. After Madelina left, Maria Elena had often stared at the map of the United States. It had to be a huge country, and she puzzled about where in it her friend might be living. Now she wondered if she might find Madelina again. Years from now, would they somehow meet somewhere in that strange new country? Perhaps they would sit together in some nice place—a fancy restaurant, possibly, with brightly colored tables and umbrellas outside—and laugh and talk about how much their lives had changed since the old days in Colima and in Hermosillo.

  Maria Elena took the papers out of the zippered pocket and studied them one by one, but they told her nothing. She had purchased some food from a stand outside the bus station, and she had eaten it all before she ever boarded the bus, savoring the wonder of eating food she had chosen for herself rather than having it slopped carelessly into a bowl by the resentful woman who had parceled out stingy servings of bad-smelling food to the inmates at El Asilo Seguro. There, Maria Elena had always gone away from the table still feeling hungry. Today she felt the strange sensation of being full. Lulled by contentment and the motion of the bus, she fell asleep.

  She spent three hours on the bus—three glorious hours—where no one told her where she had to go or what she had to do. When the bus finally reached the station in Nogales, Maria Elena was awash in a combination of anxiety and anticipation. But then she saw him standing there on the platform, watching for her. Catching a glimpse of her face at the window, he smiled and waved. In that moment she recognized him. He was someone who had come to El Asilo Seguro the summer before, a kind doctor who had treated the children there, many of whom hadn’t seen a real doctor in years, if ever.